13 The Saint Intervenes (Boodle)

by Leslie Charteris

  "Shall we get him an owl?" Simon suggested.

  "What for?" asked Patricia unguardedly.

  "It would be rather nice," said the Saint reflectively, "to get Titus an owl."

  Patricia Holm shuddered.

  Over the cocktails and stuffed olives, however, she relented.

  "It's started," she said. "Hammel and Costello had a long conference with him this morning. I suppose they finished it after lunch, but I'd heard enough before they went out."

  She told him every detail of the discussion that had taken place in Mr. Titus Oates's private office, and Simon Templar smiled approvingly as he listened. Taken in conjunction with what he already knew, the summaries of various other con­versations which she had reported to him, it left him with the whole structure of the conspiracy clearly catalogued in his mind.

  "You must remember to take that microphone out of his office first thing in the morning," he remarked. "It might spoil things if Titus came across it, and I don't think you'll need to listen any more. . . . Here, where did you get that from?"

  "From sowing my wild Oates," said Patricia angelically, as the waitress departed with a five-pound note on her tray.

  Simon Templar regarded her admiringly.

  "Darling," he said at length, "there are no limits to your virtues. If you're as rich as that, you can not only buy me another Old Fashioned but you can take me to dinner at the Barcelona as well."

  On the way to the restaurant he bought an Evening Stand­ard and opened it at the table.

  "Midorient closed at 21," he said. "It looks as if we shall have to name a ward in our Old Age Home for Retired Burglars after Comrade Oates."

  "How much shall we make if we buy and sell with him?" asked the girl.

  The Saint smiled.

  "I'm afraid we should lose a lot of money," he said. "You see, Titus isn't going to sell."

  She stared at him, mystified; and he closed the menu and laughed at her silently.

  "Did you by any chance hear Titus boasting about a stamp he bought for his collection last night?" he asked, and she nodded. "Well, old darling, I'm the bird who sold it to him. I never thought I should sink to philatelism even in my dotage, but in this case it seemed the best way to work. Titus is already convinced that I'm the greatest stamp-sleuth in captivity, and when he hears about the twopenny blue Mauri­tius I've discovered for him he will be fairly purring through the town. I don't see any reason why our Mr. Oates should go unpunished for his sins and make a fortune out of this low swindle. He collects stamps, but I've got an even better hobby. I collect queer friends." The Saint was lighting a ciga­rette, and his blue eyes danced over the match. "Now listen carefully while I tell you the next move."

  Mr. Wallington Titus Oates was gloating fruitily over the closing prices on the Friday evening when his telephone bell rang.

  He had reason to gloat. The news story provided by the cablegrams of Mr. Ischolskov had been so admirably worded that it had hit the front page of every afternoon edition the previous day; and a jumpy market had done the rest. The results exceeded his most optimistic estimates. On the Wednes­day night Midorients had closed at 32, and dealings in the street had taken them up to 34. They opened on Thursday morning at 38, and went to 50 before noon. One lunch edition ran a special topical article on fortunes made in oil, the sun shone brilliantly, England declared for 537 for six wickets in the first Test, all the brokers and jobbers felt happy, and Midorients finally went to 61 at the close. Moreover, in the evening paper which Mr. Oates was reading there could not be found a breath of suspicion directed against the news which had caused the boom. The Midorient directors had issued a statement declaring that they were awaiting further details, that their manager on the spot was a reliable man not given to hysterical exaggerations, and that for the moment they were satisfied that prosperity had returned to an oil field which, they pointed out, had merely been suffering a temporary set-back. Mr. Gates had had much to do with the wording of the state­ment himself; and if it erred somewhat on the side of opti­mism, the error could not by any stretch of imagination have been described as criminal misrepresentation.

  And when Mr. Oates picked up his receiver and heard what it had to say, his cup was filled to overflowing.

  "I've got you that twopenny blue," sad a voice which he recognised. "It's a peach! It must be one of the most perfect specimens in existence—and it'll only cost you nine hundred quid."

  Mr. Oates gripped the receiver, and his eyes lighted up with the unearthly fire which illumines the stare of the collector when he sees a coveted trophy within his grasp. It was, in its way, a no less starkly primitive manifestation than the dilat­ing nostrils of a bloodhound hot on the scent.

  "Where is it?" barked Mr. Oates, in the baying voice of the same hound. "When can I see it? Can you bring it round? Have you got it yourself? Where is it ?

  "Well, that's the snag, Mr. Oates," said the Saint apolo­getically. "The owner won't let it go. He won't even let it out of his safe until it's paid for. He says he's got to have a cheque in his pocket before he'll let me take it away. He's a crotchety old bird, and I think he's afraid I might light a cigarette with it or something."

  Mr. Oates fairly quivered with suppressed emotion.

  "Well, where does he live?" he yelped. "I'll settle him. I'll go round and see him at once. What's his name? What's the address ?"

  "His name is Dr. Jethero," Simon answered methodically, "and he lives at 105 Matlock Gardens, Netting Hill. I think you'll catch him there—I've only just left him, and he said nothing about going out."

  "Dr. Jethero—105—Matlock—Gardens—Notting—Hill," repeated Mr. Oates, reaching for a message pad and scribbling frantically.

  "By the way," said the Saint, "I said he was crotchety, but you may think he's just potty. He's got some sort of a bee in his bonnet about people trying to get in and steal his stamp, and he told me that if you want to call and see him you've got to give a password."

  "A password?" bleated Mr. Oates.

  "Yes. I told him that everybody knew Titus Oates, but ap­parently that wasn't good enough for him. If you go there you've got to say 'I was whipped from Aldgate to Newgate and from Newgate to Tyburn.' Can you remember that?"

  "Of course," said Mr. Oates indignantly. "I know all about that. Titus Oates was an ancestor of mine. Come and see me in the morning, my dear boy—I'll have a present waiting for you. Good-bye."

  Mr. Oates slammed back the receiver and leapt up as if unleashed. Dithering with ecstasy and excitement, he stuffed his note of the address into his pocket, grabbed a cheque­book, and dashed out into the night.

  The taxi ride to his destination seemed interminable, and when he got there he was in such a state of expectant rap­ture that he flung the driver a pound note and scurried up the steps without waiting for change. The house was one of those unwieldly Victorian edifices with which the west of London is encumbered against all hopes of modern develop­ment; and in the dim street lighting he did not notice that all the windows were barred, nor would he have been likely to speculate upon the reasons for that peculiar feature if he had noticed it.

  The door was opened by a white-coated man, and Mr. Oates almost bowled him over as he dashed past him into the hall.

  "I want Dr. Jethero," he bayed. "I'm Titus Oates!"

  The man closed the door and looked at him curiously.

  "Mr. Titus Oates, sir?"

  "Yes!" roared the financier impatiently. "Titus Oates. Tell him I was whipped from Aldgate to Newgate, and from Newgate to Tyburn. And hurry up!"

  The man nodded perfunctorily, and edged past him at a cautious distance of which Mr. Oates was too wrought up to see the implications.

  "Yes, sir. Will you wait in here a moment, sir?"

  Mr. Oates was ushered into a barely furnished distempered room and left there. With an effort he fussed himself down to a superficial calm—he was Titus Oates, a power in the City, and he must conduct himself accordingly. Dr. Jethero might misunderstand
a blundering excitement. If he was crotchety, and perhaps even potty, he must be handled with tact. Mr. Oates strode up and down the room, working off his overflow of excitement. There was a faint characteristic flavour of iodoform in the air, but Mr. Oates did not even notice that.

  Footsteps sounded along the hall, and the door opened again. This time it admitted a grey-bearded man who also wore a white coat. His keen spectacled eyes examined the financier calmly. Mr. Oates mustered all his self-control.

  "I am Titus Oates," he said with simple dignity.

  The grey-bearded man nodded.

  "You wanted to see me?" he said; and Mr. Oates recalled his instructions again.

  "Titus Oates," he repeated gravely. "I was whipped from Aldgate to Newgate, and from Newgate to Tyburn."

  Dr. Jethero studied him for a moment longer, and glanced towards the door, where the white-coated attendant was wait­ing unobtrusively—Mr. Oates had not even noticed the oddity of that.

  "Yes, yes," he said soothingly. "And you were pilloried in Palace Yard, weren't you?"

  "That's right," said Mr. Oates eagerly. "And outside the Royal Exchange. They put me in prison for life, but they let me out at the Revolution and gave me my pension back."

  Dr. Jethero made clucking noises with his tongue.

  "I see. A very unfortunate business. Would you mind com­ing this way, Mr. Oates?"

  He led the way up the stairs, and Mr. Oates followed him blissfully. The whole rigmarole seemed very childish, but if it pleased Dr. Jethero, Mr. Oates was prepared to go to any lengths to humour him. The white-coated attendant followed Mr. Oates. Dr. Jethero opened the door of a room on the second floor, and stood aside for Mr. Oates to pass in. The door had a barred grille in its upper panels through which the interior of the room could be observed from the outside, an eccentricity which Mr. Oates was still ready to accept as being in keeping with the character of his host.

  It was the interior of the room into which he was shown that began to place an excessive strain on his adaptability. It was without furnishings of any kind, unless the thick kind of mattress in one corner could be called furnishings, and the walls and floor were finished in some extraordinary style of decoration which made them look like quilted upholstery.

  Mr. Oates looked about him, and turned puzzledly to his host.

  "Well," he said, "where's the stamp?"

  "What stamp?" asked Dr. Jethero.

  Mr. Oates's laboriously achieved restraint was wearing thin again.

  "Don't you understand? I'm Titus Oates. I was whipped from Aldgate to Newgate, and from Newgate to Tyburn. Didn't you hear what I said?"

  "Yes, yes, yes," murmured the doctor peaceably. "You're Titus Oates. You stood in the pillory and they pelted you with rotten eggs."

  "Well," said Mr. Oates, "what about the stamp?"

  Dr. Jethero cleared his throat.

  "Just a minute, Mr. Oates. Suppose we go into that pres­ently. Would you mind taking off your coat and shoes?"

  Mr. Oates gaped at him.

  "This is going too far," he protested. "I'm Titus Oates. Everybody know Titus Oates. You remember—the Popish Plot——"

  "Mr. Oates," said the doctor sternly, "will you take off your coat and shoes?"

  The white-coated attendant was advancing stealthily to­wards him, and a sudden vague fear seized on the financier. Now he began to see the reason for the man's extraordinary behaviour. He was not crotchety. He was potty. He was worse—he must be a raving homicidal lunatic. Heaven knew what he would be doing next. A wild desire to be away from number 105 Matlock Gardens gripped Mr. Oates—a desire that could not even be quelled by the urge to possess a twopenny blue Mauritius in perfect preservation.

  "Never mind," said Mr. Oates liberally. "I'm not really interested. I don't collect stamps at all. I'm just Titus Oates. Everyone knows me. I'm sure you'll excuse me—I have an appointment——"

  He was edging towards the door, but Dr. Jethero stood in the way.

  "Nobody's going to hurt you, Mr. Oates," he said; and then he caught the desperate gleam in Mr. Oates's eye, and signed quickly to the attendant.

  Mr. Oates was seized suddenly from behind in a deft grip. Overcome with terror, he struggled like a maniac, and he was a big man; but he was helpless in the expert hands that held him. He was tripped and flung to the floor, and pinioned there with practised skill. Through whirling mists of horror he saw the doctor coming towards him with a hypodermic syringe, and he was still yelling feebly about the Popish Plot when the needle stabbed into his arm. . . .

  Dr. Jethero went downstairs and rang up a number which he had been given.

  "I've got your uncle, Mr. Tombs," he announced. "He gave us a bit of trouble, but he's quite safe now."

  Simon Templar, who had found the name of Tombs a convenient alias before, grinned invisibly into the transmitter.

  "That's splendid. Did he give you a lot of trouble?"

  "He was inclined to be violent, but we managed to give him an injection, and when he wakes up he'll be in a strait-jacket. He's really a most interesting case," said the doctor with professional enthusiasm. "Quite apart from the delusion that he is Titus Oates, he seems to have some extraor­dinary hallucination about a stamp. Had you noticed that be­fore?"

  "I hadn't," said the Saint. "You may be able to find out some more about that. Keep him under observation, doctor, and call me again on Monday morning."

  He rang off and turned gleefully to Patricia Holm, who was waiting at his elbow.

  "Titus is in safe hands," he said. "And now I've got a call of my own to make."

  "Who to?" she asked.

  He showed her a scrap of paper on which he had jotted down the words of what appeared to be a telegram.

  Amazing discovery stop have reason to believe boom may be based on genuine possibilities stop do not on any account sell without hearing from me.

  "Dicky Tremayne's in Paris, and he'll send it for me," said the Saint. "A copy goes to Abe Costello and Jules Hammel tonight—I just want to make sure that they follow Titus down the drain. By the way, we shall clear about twenty thousand if Midorients are still at 61 when they open again tomorrow morning."

  "But are you sure Jethero won't get into trouble?" she said.

  Simon Templar nodded.

  "Somehow I feel that Titus will prefer to keep his mouth shut after I've had a little chat with him on Monday," he said; and it is a matter of history that he was absolutely right.

  Ill

  The Newdick Helicopter

  "I'm afraid," said Patricia Holm soberly, "you'll be getting into trouble again soon."

  Simon Templar grinned, and opened another bottle of beer. He poured it out with a steady hand, unshaken by the future predicted for him.

  "You may be right, darling," he admitted. "Trouble is one of the things that sort of happen to me, like other people have colds."

  "I've often heard you complaining about it," said the girl sceptically.

  The Saint shook his head.

  "You wrong me," he said. "Posterity will know me as a maligned, misunderstood, ill-used victim of a cruel fate. I have tried to be good. Instinctive righteousness glows from me like an inward light. But nobody gives it a chance. What do you suggest?"

  "You might go into business."

  "I know. Something safe and respectable, like manufacturing woollen combinations for elderly ladies and lorgnettes. We might throw in a pair of lorgnettes with every suit. You could knit them, and I'd do the fitting—the fitting of the lorgnettes, of course." Simon raised his glass and drank deeply. "It's an attractive idea, old darling, but all these schemes involve laying out a lot of capital on which you have to wait such a hell of a long time for a return. Besides, there can't be much of a profit in it. On a rough estimate, the amount of wool required to circumnavigate a fifty-four inch bust ——"

  Monty Hayward, who was also present, took out a to­bacco-pouch and began to fill his pipe.

  "I had some capital once," he said reminisce
ntly, "but it didn't do me much good."

  "How much can you lend me?" asked the Saint hopefully.

  Monty brushed stray ends of tobacco from his lap and tested the draught through his handiwork cautiously.

  "I haven't got it any more, but I don't think I'd lend it to you if I had," he said kindly. "Anyway, the point doesn't arise, because a fellow called Oscar Newdick has got it. Didn't I ever tell you about that?"

  The Saint moved his head negatively, and settled deeper into his chair.

  "It doesn't sound like you, Monty. D'you mean to say you were hornswoggled ?"

  Monty nodded.

  "I suppose you might call it that. It happened about six years ago, when I was a bit younger and not quite so wise. It wasn't a bad swindle on the whole, though." He struck a match and puffed meditatively. "This fellow Newdick was a bloke I met on the train coming down from the office. He used to get into the same compartment with me three or four times a week, and naturally we took to passing the time of day—you know the way one does. He was an aeronautical engineer and a bit of an inventor, apparently. He was experi­menting with autogiros, and he had a little one-horse factory near Walton where he was building them. He used to talk a lot of technical stuff about them to me, and I talked techni­cal stuff about make-up and dummies to him—I don't sup­pose either of us understood half of what the other was talk­ing about, so we got on famously."

  With his pipe drawing satisfactorily, Monty possessed him­self of the beer-opener and executed a neat flanking move­ment towards the source of supply.

  "Well, one day this fellow Newdick asked me if I'd like to drop over and have a look at his autogiros, so the follow­ing Saturday afternoon I hadn't anything particular to do and I took a run out to his aerodrome to see how he was getting along. All he had there was a couple of corrugated-iron sheds and a small field which he used to take off from and land at, but he really had got a helicopter effect which he said he'd made himself. He told me all about it and how it worked, which was all double-Dutch to me; and then he asked me if I'd like to go up in it. So I said 'Thank you very much, I should simply hate to go up in it.' You know what these things look like—an ordinary aeroplane with the wings taken off and just a sort of large fan business to hold you up in the air—I never thought they looked particularly safe even when they're properly made, and I certainly didn't feel like risking my neck in this home-made version that he'd rigged up out of old bits of wood and angle iron. However, he was so insistent about it and seemed so upset when I refused that eventually I thought I'd better gratify the old boy and just keep on praying that the damn thing wouldn't fall to pieces before we got down again."